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Canadian Spam Levels - Up? Down? You Be the Judge
spamfighter writes "Survey firm Ipsos-Reid has taken the interesting stance that spam to Canadians has been attenuated by 20% because of the federal privacy law PIPEDA which is so fearsome in nature that is scares off even the biggest- baddest spammers in other countries. CAUCE Canada has their doubts."
While numbers can be deceiving, I do believe tougher law will prevent crimes.
I remember reading a Chinese story about an emperor visiting a village with a very deep well. He asked one of the villagers if anyone had fallen into the well. The answer was no, because the well is so deep and everybody knows that, so no one has ever been careless enough to fall into it.
And back to the reality, one of the games that I'm involved in has recently introduced a "crime in the city" feature, and many players have been attacked as a result. However, as soon as the first criminal was arrested and mourned about the harsh punishment of being caught (lost points, jail time and whatnot), crime rate drops almost instantly.
Having said all these, sometimes I think the law is not tough enough because we do not yet know how to effectively identify and prosecute the offenders.
By the way, the easter egg that I mentioned here few weeks ago still has not been discovered...
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Please keep in mind that Canadian privacy laws are very different than those in both US and EU, so I recommend reding PrivacyInfo.ca by Professor Michael Geist (University of Ottawa's Faculty of Law). Knowing the most important differences is essential to fully understand the issues in question so you will save a lot of time if you read about both Federal Privacy Legislation and Provincial Privacy Legislation first. The article linked in this story makes much less sense without appropriate background.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Uhm, pardon, that is hillarious, eh?
Spam will only go down once the majority of ISPs have deep packet scanning routers, so the crud won't propagate. Yes, I know, that is censorship, but it is inevitable.
Considering that Canadians, like anybody else, can have e-mail addresses that don't end in .ca, there's no way for spammers to know that they're not spamming Canadians. If Canadian laws were having an impact on spam, it would seem that the rest of us would experience a decrease in spam as well.
I am an American living in Canada and I need to deal with some US ISPs. For example, my father uses AOL for email. I use Shaw -- I am not sure there actually is another cable service provider in Canada -- and when I first moved here I was unable to send or recieve email from or to my father.
I later found out that some of my Japanese friends that use AOL accounts couldnt get my email and I couldnt get theirs.
This has since changed, and I can now get email from them and they can recieve mine. I found this to be really annoying at the time, but I did get much less spam on my canadian email accounts than on my US accounts.
A final note is that there is a difference between the amount of spam I get on University accounts in the US and Canada. I have 3 accounts at US univeristies and 1 in Canada. The accounts in the US get more than 50 spams a day. The Canadian one has never even recieved 1!!! This seems impressive, however, I think that someone is just stealing the outlook domain listings at US universities and selling them, this doesnt seem to be a problem yet here. Either that or they have the best spam filter I have ever seen. Cant figure it out.
100 messages a day.
5 real ones. 95 spam.
P.S. Canadian privacy laws are a freakin joke. You can't find out the balance of my chequing account, but the Americans can find out anything they want if any of the companies I deal with are an American subsidiary. HA! Privacy... sure.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
I think it was last week or two weeks ago, I opened one of the many emails in my inbox at work, which was about the spam problem.
Long story short, from what I read, I think that when spam reaches the point where it's impossible for the government to effectively use the current email infrastructure, someone somewhere is going to call in the Mounties, no doot aboot it, eh.
IANAE at international spam regulation laws, but if someone is just sending out random spam to hotmail and/or Yahoo! email addresses, are they really going to bother weeding out where each individual email owner lives and decide from there if they should spam it or not?
I live in London, Ontario. I can tell you at least this: I use my hotmail address more often than I do my ISP provided one (Rogers High-Speed), and the Hotmail one seems to get nearly no spam despite being the most exposed of the two (barely use ISP one). Hotmal is around 3 - 10 bulk messages a day that go straight to the trashbox. Whereas my ISP mail gets about 60 bulk messages a day. Although it does filter them out, it seems my U.S.-based email address gets less spam than my local Canadian one.
So, does it really even matter?
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
A law is due soon, and given the number of zombies, it should make ISPs liable if they do not disconnect trojaned customers in due time.
There is no excuse for letting a trojaned computer on the Internet, it is a major nuisance. Punitive disconnection ought to be a good way of clueing-in john Q. Bozo in properly running a computer.
Vidéoétron is notoriously clueless when it comes to zombie, making it's networks one of the filthiest cesspools. By contrast, Stupidico blocked port 25 a long time ago, so almost no spam emanates from their network.
I run several servers with a few businesses etc hosting their email across the board I probably have 400 users give or take 20. In recent months the spam problem was getting worse and worse. I have had spamassassin and other software running on the system to mark the messages as spam but the over all problem wasnt resolved and it kept getting worse. I have since changed the way that our servers operate by using RBL firewalls across the board with several different RBLs including spamhaus, sorbs, spamcop and dsbl. Since taking that action the spam has dropped from just under a million emails marked as spam a month to around 34000. That is a huge drop in spam. I also log all connections that are refused because of RBLs so that I can see if there are any bad entries if anyone complains about failed email delivery. All in all the amount of emails being rejected has also been falling as the "spammers" and other "bulk email" providers that are listed on the RBLs and have users emails remove the emails from the lists they are using.
Its not a perfect solution but it has reduced it to such an extent that the servers are now performing much better. Customers are more happy, spammers get screwed and everyone lives happily ever after.
No mod points today, huh?
I did read the article, and I don't see how it makes any difference with respect to my earlier comment whether the law applies to brokering in e-mail addresses or sending spam to them. People can't say with any certainty whether an e-mail address belongs to a Canadian or not. If Canadian laws were having an impact, then spammers would be less likely to swap *or* spam e-mail addresses in general, and all of us regardless of nationality could expect our inboxes to be less abused.
In fact, the assertion discussed/refuted by the OP was that Canadian laws were having an effect on spamming, whether direct or indirect. Seems reasonable to me that even if PIPEDA is designed only to restrict brokering in e-mail addresses, the difference really isn't relevant since the assertion is plainly about the receipt of spam.
...don't forget the baby-eating dingos! Wait, maybe you could release some other kind of species to wipe them out - that should solve all your problems!
I'm Amerind background. I don't much like any of the colonists who took our land in the US/Canada/Mexico/All-of-the-Americas. But out of them all Canada is the only guys who seem sorry (or pretend to be) and actually give back rights and land when asked. When I look at Australia, I see a big fucking racist state that doesn't consider its "aboriginals" citizens. You don't have much to boast about with your country in mine and many others eyes.
Your guess is as good as mine whether this data is worth anything, but daily mail volume for these stats is about 1,000 emails daily. The spam "level" is an index computed by our mail server.
July, 2004....21.7
Aug, 2004.....24.5
Sept, 2004....23.2
Oct, 2004.....27.1
Nov, 2004.....24.2
Dec, 2004.....29.6
Jan, 2005.....26.1
Feb, 2005.....29.6